My Man (A SciFi Short)

Pulled from a dream by the hunger in his belly, the man scratched his castration scar, adjusted the metal collar on his neck, and walked over to a cavity in his bedroom wall to await breakfast. His finely attuned circadian rhythm prompted him, and before long, the scent of hot bacon and eggs cut through the sterile lemon-alcohol that normally permeated his room.

After eating, his belly full, he walked naked out the door of his plastic one-room cabin. The faux-daylight kissed his cheeks as he emerged into the garden. Endless white panels garnished a massive dome that enclosed his habitat, a large sphere serving as its sun, carried each day by a six-jointed arm from one side of the dome to the other, adjusting its emission strength to give the man some likeness of the days on his origin planet.

Small creeks of drinking water snaked around the floor, and rows of decorative plants bordered the streams. Various-sized mounds of soft coverings protruded from the ground, giving him myriad options for a midday nap.

The man skipped out onto the grass field toward a structure of winding pipes and ropes, running in small bursts simply because he liked doing so. He climbed up a smooth rope ladder onto the alien jungle gym and began to play.

Countless days of climbing and weaving through the serpentine framework had given him the strength and coordination of an amateur gymnast; his movements powerful and graceful. Hand over hand, he swung on wooden monkey bars, until one of the rungs snapped, sending him plummeting to the floor. He bounced gently on the soft cushion of the grass and came to rest without injury—only embarrassment.

While lying there, he noticed a wilted plant. Curious, he crawled closer to get a better look. For the first time, he noticed a web of small pipes flowing from the base of the plant. He followed the pipes until he noticed a kink in the hose. He massaged the hose back into working position, and smiled as the soil at the base of the plant turned a dark shade of brown.

Satisfied with his discovery and his ability to fix the irrigation system, the man lay in a soft patch of grass and took a nap. 

Although he had no conventional understanding of time, his bowel movements came like clockwork. He waddled over to a plastic tree and leaned against it as he relieved himself. Once he had finished, a door opened in the wall and a team of small robots scuttled out. As the robots cleaned his mess on the ground, the man went down on all fours. Another robot blasted his rear with a soapy mixture followed by a rinse of warm water. He was conflicted about this process. He felt both emasculated and pleasured by the efficiency of the cleaning.

Later that afternoon, the light orb that acted as the habitat’s sun flashed green, and a cheeky synthesized melody rang out from every direction. The man smiled and jogged across his habitat to a field that would have otherwise been empty had it not been for a heap of metal plates, tubes, and pneumatic power cylinders. He grabbed a metal baseball bat from a display on the habitat wall. Lasers on the ceiling projected a regulation baseball field on the ground.

The heap of motors and actuators in the center of the field rattled and began forming itself into the shape of a head and torso. Each piece being lifted by a bundle of thin, multi-jointed metal arms which puppeteered the humanoid form from the ground. One of the cleaner bots scurried to the pitcher’s mound, curled into a ball and floated into the freshly formed hand of the machine. It wound up and pitched the ball. 

The man swung with all his strength. The swing connected and launched the ball-bot into the outfield. Fair ball. Fanfare. The ball-bot landed, gathered itself, and ran back to the marionette pitcher.

He swung until his arms burned. Once his hands were sore, and his back tired, he returned the bat to its rack and approached the machine’s open arms. The machine ran its metal fingers through the man’s hair. He let himself fall into it and it held him, pulling his head into the soft cushion covering its chest. The man melted in its embrace.

The soft, fluid movements of the machine suddenly stopped, and its pieces disassembled into their rest position, as they always did.

Tubes from the ceiling carried warm water into a fabricated cloud above him, and it rained down on him, washing him clean. He let himself air dry and returned to his bedchamber where he was greeted with a dinner of fine steak, potatoes, and asparagus. He ate until his stomach bulged, and a swarm of small cleaner-bots picked the pieces of meat from his teeth.

Not a bad day.

***

One day, the man went to his usual spot for breakfast, but there was no bacon and no eggs. He panicked. He paced around his chamber, he screamed until his throat became raw. Eventually the food dispenser opened up, but in the place of his usual meal was a wet meat brick. 

He crouched down, putting the meat brick at his eyeline. Hovering around it, he pinched off a small piece and held it to his nose. His stomach turned as the dank meat must hit his nostrils. Rage surged through his body, and he knocked the meal onto the floor in protest. A distant vicious howl resonated through the habitat, and he was thrown across the room by a shock from his collar, crashing through his minimalist furniture. 

He came to, roused by a thousand tiny fingers on his chest as a line of cleaner bots crawled over him to remove the wet meat from the floor.

The meat bricks continued for a few days, but before long the steaks returned. The man was relieved, but his trust was shaken.

A few days later, the sun-orb held in its afternoon position, the man hopped over to the baseball field, the cheerful melody already playing in his head. He kicked the grass and took practice swings until the sun orb had completed its journey to the west side of the habitat. There would be no game today, and he would not be held.

Things then seemingly returned to normal. Bacon, naps, baseball, affection, and steak. But despite being back to his routine, the man felt things were different now. Before long, leaks and rust appeared on the walls of the normally pristine habitat. The air became thicker and singed the man’s lungs during intense bouts of recreation. He no longer ran for the joy of running. 

In only a month, an entire row of plants became dry and wilted. The man tried his usual fix on the pipes, following the tube to find the blockage, tracing the pipe all the way to the wall of the habitat. He found no kink, no blockage. There was no water in the pipe at all. He cupped water in his hands from the stream and brought it to the plants, but soon realized the futility of his endeavor.  

This would continue until the man had learned to expect meat bricks over steak. And boredom over baseball.

Whoever was watching over him was losing interest. 

He couldn’t sleep and instead spent hours at night rearranging the tracks on his model train set. He watched the little train rotate around the table. Once, he removed a length of track and the train fell from the table onto the floor. It flipped twice, landed wheels down, and rolled across the room. The wall opened up and cleaner bots emerged, formed a line, and passed the model train one to the next until the toy was back on the table. 

As they retreated, the man caught one of the cleaner bots under his finger tip and pressed the life out of it. He half expected the shock collar to send him careening across the cabin. But no shock came.

***

Meat bricks for breakfast again. The man’s stomach turned, nothing curbed his hunger quite like nausea. He crouched over the meal and feigned eating the brick, but palmed most of it in his hand. 

Pleased with the success of his deception, he departed into the garden. He grabbed his baseball bat and went over to the plastic tree. Methodically he tapped the bat on each panel of the habitat wall until the pitch of the impact changed from a plink to a dull thud. He took the wad of meat in his hand and hurled it out into the garden. The panel opened, and as the robots exited, he slipped into the vent.

He looked back at the garden. His mouth watered as he pictured the warm steak that could appear in his room—or possibly a meat brick. Nevertheless, he was compelled to move forward, driven by the innate human distaste for imprisonment or perhaps fear of boredom.

Sweat and pain became his world. His skin had chafed from hours of slithering through the dark maze of tubes and tunnels. The endless homogeneous pipes and panels made it impossible to gauge his progress. After turning around and doubling back more times than useful, he came upon a grate in the floor of the duct, and as he traversed it, the vent collapsed under his weight.

The man landed on the floor of a small room, his baseball bat fell on him, and dim white light strips started flashing red. The pulses of light phased toward him from every direction. A percussive thumping traveled through the plastic floor to his ear. This was different from the familiar pitter patter of the cleaner bots, there was weight behind it.

A dozen mechanical spiders with honeycomb scales emerged and surrounded the man. Each scale lifted from the robots’ bodies, carried by its own mechanical arm. The swarm assembled themselves into a cage-like structure and began advancing toward him. As the wall of hexagons closed in on him, he started swinging. 

The man’s bare skin squeaked against the thin plastic wall as he slid into a sitting position surrounded by the robots’ corpses. The close quarters combat had taken a toll on both the man and the vent chamber.

Once his breath had softened enough, he heard the faint hiss of air escaping from the panel upon which he was resting his head. He propped himself up with the bat, gathered what strength he had left, and began smashing the panel. He forced his way through, and breathed in the air of freedom.

His eyes became wide and bloodshot and his lungs burned. Though he inhaled the air of freedom, he found it composed primarily of ammonia. As he choked on the alien atmosphere, his steaming convulsing body was lifted off the ground by the hand of his god. A massive creature towered over him, frantically fumbling with his limp body. The creature let out a cry of despair, and clutched the man to its chest, its toxic, polyp-covered skin stinging him as he drew his last breaths.

With a protruding talon, the creature scraped a hole into the earth and placed the man’s body in it. Death had frozen a look of terror and surprise on the man’s face. As the creature covered his man with dirt, he cried out to his mother, and she held him as he wept.

It was the creature’s first brush with death; it would not be his last. The mother remembered the death of her first pet and the deaths of her grandparents. Her father. She knelt to take her child in her arms, and they cried together. She wiped the tears from her child’s precious tentacle-covered face. And as she carried him from the grave, she made a mental note to find the receipt for the faulty habitat unit.